Chapter 10
What Makes A Site Sellable? So what exactly makes a site sellable? That's the million-dollar question! Your site doesn't have to be the only site of its kind to be sellable. When I sold my Banner Advertising Network site, there were lots of other banner networks on the Internet. Mine was an original site, but not an original idea. There were many potential ways to make money with the site, and it had a decent base of registered users or "members". I would recommend that your site has original graphics. And of course, you must have your own domain name. www.YourName.com And of course, your site has to be at least a little popular. You need a decent amount of daily site traffic. The more people that visit your site each day, the better off you'll be. To keep a steady stream of people coming to my sites I use web promotion software, namely the Submission-Spider (http://www.Submission-Spider.com). I've tried just about everything out there and this is the best software I've ever used (in my opinion). It registers your site on all the most popular search engines so that when someone goes to Yahoo or Google or Lycos etc and types in words related to your site, your site pops up and they click on the link and come to your site. I usually aim for around 1,000 visitors per day (that's no problem for a tool like this). 1,000 visitors per day is sufficient when trying to sell your site. Buy that software. It will pay for itself so many times over you'll forget how much you originally paid for it. Not only will it submit your site to the search engines. It will check to see what position you have there, how many people are linking to your site (good info to tell your potential buyer), if there are any dead links on your web site, and other stuff as well. It's a little pricey, but they offer a payment plan that anyone can afford (and a money back guarantee). Unless you want to spend thousands of dollars on advertising, there is no better way and no cheaper way to drive traffic to your site than the Submission-Spider. I've tried Web Position Gold (it was so-so but more expensive), Exploits Submission Wizard (way more expensive and far less useful), iTrafficSeeker (cheaper but harder to use and not great results) and a number of smaller company's software titles that weren't worth mentioning. One side note, the Submission-Spider offers a referral program. If you refer just 1 person to them, you earn back the cost of your copy. (*Note: I don't get any referral payments for this endorsement). So not only will it drive thousands of people to your site, but it costs you nothing if you refer just 1 person to them. Sounds like a no brainer to me! So what else makes a site sellable besides large site traffic? Well, certainly if your site has a lot of registered users or "members" you've got a sellable site. Especially if these are targeted prospects. That is, if they are all interested in a certain thing, and you know what that thing is. Let's say, for instance, that you had a fishing web site. And you offered a free subscription to your "How To Fish Like A Pro" newsletter. Let's say you had 10,000 subscribers. Those 10,000 people and your web site would certainly be valuable to a fishing lure company. Or a fishing Rod company. Or even an offline Fishing Magazine. All because they could take those 10,000 targeted people and sell them their fishing stuff. Of course, you'd have a hard time selling that site to Microsoft because they don't deal with fishing products. That's really the bottom line here. Your site has to be valuable to someone for some reason to be sellable. Figure out who that person is and you're over half way there to selling your site.
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